Thanks Alot

I realize it’s pretty tiresome for those of us who are on the cranky/old/OCD end of the blogging spectrum to keep taking potshots at textspeak and smileys. If you’re in our court it’s like fish in a barrel; to everyone else it’s just egregiously bitchy. But every once in a while someone comes along with such a good rant I can’t resist passing it along.

In her blog Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh provides some necessary coping strategies for this day and age. Annoyed by the endless use of “u” for “you”? Imagine the unfortunate typist only has one finger on each hand and can’t type more than a character at a time. Lack of apostrophes or capital letters? Picture your correspondent as an eagle. “It would be a hassle if you had to hop in the air and use your feet to karate-chop two keys simultaneously every time you wanted to use the shift key to make a capital letter. Also, eagles lack manual dexterity, so I can understand why they’d want to leave out apostrophes. Eagles are all about efficiency.” But the best is the cuddly yet slightly menacing Alot:

The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world….

If someone says something like “I feel lonely alot” or “I’m angry alot,” I’m going to imagine them standing there with an emo haircut, sharing their feelings with an Alot.

Sure, it’s a losing battle. Those kids aren’t getting off your lawn anytime soon. But every little bit of dissidence helps. And we all know how much.

nbm—archy! I do love him. But even archy always spelled out “you.” And even if he’d had access to one-stroke smileys, you know he still would have gone to all the trouble to type out “toujours gai toujours gai.”